The Effort
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
For readers of Station Eleven and Good Morning, Midnight comes an electric, heart-pounding novel of love and sacrifice that follows people around the world as they unite to prevent a global catastrophe.
When dark comet UD3 was spotted near Jupiter's orbit, its existence was largely ignored. But to individuals who knew better -- scientists like Benjamin Schwartz, manager of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies -- the threat this eight-kilometer comet posed to the survival of the human race was unthinkable. The 150-million-year reign of the dinosaurs ended when an asteroid impact generated more than a billiontimes the energy of an atomic bomb.
What would happen to Earth's seven billion inhabitants if a similar event were allowed to occur?
Ben and his indomitable girlfriend Amy Kowalski fly to South America to assemble an international counteraction team, whose notable recruits include Love Mwangi, a UN interpreter and nomad scholar, and Zhen Liu, an extraordinary engineer from China's national space agency. At the same time, on board a polar icebreaker life continues under the looming shadow of comet UD3. Jack Campbell, a photographer for National Geographic, works to capture the beauty of the Arctic before it is gone forever. Gustavo Wayãpi, a Nobel Laureate poet from Brazil, struggles to accept the recent murder of his beloved twin brother. And Maya Gutiérrez, an impassioned marine biologist is -- quite unexpectedly -- falling in love for the first time.
Together, these men and women must fight to survive in an unknown future with no rules and nothing to be taken for granted. They have two choices: neutralize the greatest threat the world has ever seen (preferably before mass hysteria hits or world leaders declare World War III) or come to terms with the annihilation of humanity itself.
Their mission is codenamed The Effort.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Holroyde's twisty if uneven debut centers on an asteroid's threat to human life, and a NASA scientist who races against the clock to save the planet. In the near-future, asteroid hunters are stunned to spot a dark comet that's only discovered when it's dangerously close to Earth. Ben Schwartz, who heads NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, is tapped by an international group to assemble a team whose impossible mission is to develop a plan to deflect the comet from its path in less than a year. The deadline is too short for one country to build an intercepting spacecraft from scratch, meaning they must win cooperation of other nations' space programs to accomplish the ambitious goal. With the U.S. led by a Trump-like president, not every country ends up going along, and as the comet gets closer, panic and societal disruptions around the world complicate Schwartz's work. The prose is sometimes clunky ("Thick spectacles magnified red-veined eyes draped with lids like unfolded origami"), but Holroyde displays a keen vision of societal and diplomatic breakdown amid imminent disaster. The deeper themes about human nature make this apocalyptic thriller more than escapist reading, though the execution could be stronger.